Cardiovascular Disease: Impact of Biomarkers, Proteomics, and Genomics

摘要

Laboratory medicine, a medical specialty with practitioners predominantly comprising clinical pathologists and doctoral scientists, has evolved as a discipline that is closely interwoven with clinical investigators, and basic and applied research scientists. As coeditors of this special issue, the 5 of us exemplify this partnership in collaborative science and have endeavored to provide current state-of-art, peer-reviewed content. We thank all the authors for their contributions. The field has advanced in several major areas over the past 100 years, including optimization of the analytical performance of assays, establishment of analyte reference cutoffs for the diagnosis or exclusion of disease with high clinical sensitivity and specificity, and investigation of the broad clinical application of biomarkers for triage and therapeutic decision-making. The current special issue of Clinical Chemistry is devoted to recent advances in the pathophysiology of cardiovascular disease and the use of current and novel biomarkers, including proteomic and genomic approaches, for diagnosis, risk assessment, treatment, and cost-effective management of patients with cardiovascular disorders.Fred S. AppleDespite the success of medical advances marked by a steady downward trend in cardiovascular deaths over the past 10 years, heart disease is still the number one cause of death in both men and women in the US (Fig. 1) (1). Biomarkers such as cardiac troponin (cTn) and natriuretic-peptides have proven clinically vital to the diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction and heart failure, respectively (2–6). Fig. 2 shows the growth in the number of cardiovascular biomarker publications, demonstrating parallel increases for both cTn and natriuretic-peptides, biomarkers that …